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Members Opening Reception Kissing through a Curtain, Gamaliel Rodriguez, Ad Minoliti[POSTPONED]

  • GET TICKETS
  • Members Event

  • Saturday, May 23, 5:30–7:30pm
  • Free for Members
    $20 Advance + Day of
  • MASS MoCA

This event has been postponed. Please stay in touch as further details will be forthcoming.

Join us on May 23 to celebrate the opening of three new exhibitions: Kissing through a Curtain, Gamaliel Rodríguez: La travesía/Le voyage, and Ad Minoliti: Fantasías Modulares.

Please join us for a performance of taracatá trabaja, conceptualized by artist Jimena Sarno and composed and designed with musician Axel Krygier. Singers Rosa Evangelina Beltrán, Gemma Castro, Vera Lugo, and Rosalie Rodriguez will perform.

RSVP: 413.664.4481 x 8112 or members@massmoca.org

Translation is an attempt to transport something from one space to another: not just languages, but also times, bodies, minds, mediums, and cultures. Accretions of meaning form as each new context adds the grit of new associations. At a moment when isolationism and xenophobia are on the rise at a global scale, the artists in Kissing through a Curtain explore what place translation — or, indeed, any attempt to communicate — occupies. Including works by Nasser Alzayani, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Kim Faler, Justin Favela, Osman Khan, Christine Sun Kim, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jimena Sarno, Clarissa Tossin, and Jessica Vaughn.

Gamaliel Rodríguez’s large-scale works on paper imagine landscapes inspired by the two-fold character of his native Puerto Rico, which the artist recently described as a mix of “beauty and chaos.” Merging industrial and natural environments, Rodríguez depicts abandoned structures surrounded by verdant greenery — which he often renders as an aerial view. Devoid of a human presence, the overgrown buildings have a dystopic yet familiar feel, prompting mis-recognitions by viewers reminded of locations in their own hometowns. Though the artist’s subjects are fictitious, they are inspired by the accumulation of manufacturing projects in Puerto Rico established and ultimately abandoned by US companies lured by tax breaks and cheap labor in the mid-20th century.

Grinning triangles, lounging cows, and winking circles populate the vibrant, queer landscapes of Ad Minoliti’s imagined worlds. Trained as a painter, Minoliti draws on the rich legacy of geometric abstraction in her native country Argentina, where geometry was used as a tool for picturing utopian alternatives. By combining abstraction with playful figuration, Minoliti upends familiar fairy tales, turning them on their head. She is particularly interested in disrupting pictorial cultural norms that uphold traditional views of sexuality and gender.

SAHA

Justin Favela, Popocatepetl e Iztaccihuatl vistos desde Atlixco, after Jose Maria Velasco, 2016
Paper and glue. 64″x 82″
Photo: Mikayla Whitmore